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Comment by Kerrick | Hacker News Reader

> Somehow we were better at using remote tools while literally in the same office than some teams are at using them now while fully remote.

I couldn't agree more. I pushed to get the place I worked for to use Slack when it first launched, moving us off AIM (ha!). Our use of Slack when we shared an office in the twenty-teens was so much better than the use I've seen of Slack/competitors on fully-remote teams.

I wonder if it's because the failure mode was, as you said, to "drop by." Now the failure mode is... just failure.

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I can't speak for everyone, but I'd say that I've noticed that younger devs simply do not chat.

My team rooms are pretty dead. I'll send stuff there but by and large the team simply doesn't use chat functions.

Perhaps the youngins are more cognisant that it's all monitored. Knowing your employer can read everything and it _will_ be used against you has a chilling effect and I'm pretty sure that's part of it.

We had such incredibly heinous group chats on our Slack that if an admin perused through the logs we'd be instantly fired and the company shut down right then and there lol. The paranoia drove everyone nuts which made it more fun.

More realistically only the ones that admin doesn't like, HR doesn't like, or the CEO doesn't like would be fired while the rest would be retained.

Arbitrary discretion in the exercise of power is the bedrock of our society.

Every healthy person I know does that. It’s as if human communication required to have secrets before people would relax about opening up.

They, for every team I’ve ever managed, have an off company owned systems chat on shit like slack or discord where they are roasting the fuck out of you.

I’ve managed to be invited or told of them after ingratiating myself to the teams, or more often, after quitting and getting invited as one of the “good ones”

They all know that every word on company shit is being monitored

Sure, but this ends up poisoning any sort of culture and creating all sorts of in-group nonsense which is almost impossible to undo.

It’d be like using Blind as your company chat - nobody goes on there to say how great their experience has been, and the tone infects everything else.

But maybe I’m just not very fun at parties…

This should be avoided at all costs by creating a culture that is receptive to people’s concerns and doesn’t do stupid things without explanation - but I get how difficult that is in reality and most orgs end up messing this up.

Maybe I'm a bit unfair to you but to me your comment basically reads as wishing employees would be good little cogs in your machinery rather than people. Like making friends is natural human behavior. Forming friend groups is natural human behavior. It's not nice to disrupt this except that of course everyone has to be able to work together when needed.

Making friends is great. Talking about work with friends is good and healthy.

Moving all of your work related chats off-platform so you can “say whatever you want” about work and eventually making it into a defacto team chat is what I’m talking about here. This isn’t chatting with friends, this is creating team divisions and huge gaps in context for the rest of your team. This approach is being a poor colleague in my opinion.

You can do both things - they’re not mutually exclusive.

You can’t do both things. Humans want to engage in certain kinds of conversation that companies try to prevent happening.

Sometimes you just want to vent and call your boss a fuckhead and it only takes one time in a persons life to see HR punishing/firing/admonishing someone for conduct on company communication channels that would have been perfectly fine in any other setting, for that person to never trust in the “company culture”

There is no environment where messy human beings fit into the perfect set of rules and behavior that companies demand

Partially thats about teams and how most corps use it, which is built primarily around information siloing and management visibility.

Is the team even effectively communicating though?

IME building up communication skills (including when and what to communicate) comes with experience.

It doesn't help that reporting people to HR is a way to career advancement.

I’ve never worked _anywhere_ where reporting someone to HR was anything but negative impacting for your prospects at the company. And I’ve worked at lots of places in many dimensions (company size, industry, age, etc)

This usually applies to Big Bank.

Is that a dynamic they have? I haven’t worked at Big Bank but I’ve worked in finance a few times and at those places and other industries I’ve worked in reporting anything to HR wouldn’t necessarily get direct consequences but you would permanently be on their radar and have to work to rule after that

I’ve worked at a big bank and other large financial service organizations.

The karmic cost / benefit is all worked out then.

I worked at a big bank and it definitely did not.

I think it’s more a shift in the culture amongst most people now than an argument of remote/in office.

Notification fatigue is a thing and people are just used to ignoring notifications and messages nowadays which ends up with slow responses and poor communication all around.

It's much easier to get a feel for how urgent things may be when you can yell down the hall.

I'm currently in feeling things out phase with my current team, and people seem really laid back about responding to messages - but it also seems like we're getting stuff done. Hard to figure.

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